Sharīʿah

Sharīʿah, also spelled Sharia, the fundamental religious concept of Islam, namely its law, systematized during the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Muslim era (8th–9th centuries ce).

Total and unqualified submission to the will of Allah (God) is the fundamental tenet of Islam: Islamic law is therefore the expression of Allah’s command for Muslim society and, in application, constitutes a system of duties that are incumbent upon a Muslim by virtue of his religious belief. Known as the Sharīʿah (literally, “the path leading to the watering place”), the law constitutes a divinely ordained path of conduct that guides Muslims toward a practical expression of religious conviction in this world and the goal of divine favour in the world to come.

Nature and significance of Islamic law

Muslim jurisprudence, the science of ascertaining the precise terms of the Sharīʿah, is known as fiqh (literally “understanding”). The historical process of the discovery of Allah’s law (see below) was regarded as completed by the end of the 9th century when the law had achieved a definitive formulation in a number of legal manuals written by different jurists. Throughout the medieval period this basic doctrine was elaborated and systematized in a large number of commentaries, and the voluminous literature thus produced constitutes the traditional textual authority of Sharīʿah law.

In classical form the Sharīʿah differs from Western systems of law in two principal respects. In the first place the scope of the Sharīʿah is much wider, since it regulates an individual’s relationship not only with one’s neighbours and with the state, which is the limit of most other legal systems, but also with God and with one’s own conscience. Ritual practices, such as the daily prayers, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage, are an integral part of Sharīʿah law and usually occupy the first chapters in the legal manuals. The Sharīʿah is also concerned as much with ethical standards as with legal rules, indicating not only what an individual is entitled or bound to do in law but also what one ought, in conscience, to do or refrain from doing. Accordingly, certain acts are classified as praiseworthy (mandūb), which means that their performance brings divine favour and their omission divine disfavour, and others as blameworthy (makrūh), which means that omission brings divine favour and commission divine disfavour; but in neither case is there any legal sanction of punishment or reward, nullity or validity. The Sharīʿah is not merely a system of law, but a comprehensive code of behaviour that embraces both private and public activities.

The second major distinction between the Sharīʿah and Western legal systems is the result of the Islamic concept of law as the expression of the divine will. With the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, communication of the divine will to human beings ceased so that the terms of the divine revelation were henceforth fixed and immutable. When, therefore, the process of interpretation and expansion of this source material was held to be complete with the crystallization of the doctrine in the medieval legal manuals, Sharīʿah law became a rigid and static system. Unlike secular legal systems that grow out of society and change with the changing circumstances of society, Sharīʿah law was imposed upon society from above. In Islamic jurisprudence it is not society that molds and fashions the law but the law that precedes and controls society.

Such a philosophy of law clearly poses fundamental problems of principle for social advancement in contemporary Islam. How can the traditional Sharīʿah law be adapted to meet the changing circumstances of modern Muslim society? This is now the central issue in Islamic law.

Historical development of Sharīʿah law

For the first Muslim community established under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad at Medina in 622, the Qurʾānic revelations laid down basic standards of conduct. But the Qurʾān is in no sense a comprehensive legal code. No more than 80 verses deal with strictly legal matters; while these verses cover a wide variety of topics and introduce many novel rules, their general effect is simply to modify the existing Arabian customary law in certain important particulars.

During his lifetime Muhammad, as the supreme judge of the community, resolved legal problems as they arose by interpreting and expanding the general provisions of the Qurʾān, and the same ad hoc activity was carried on after his death by the caliphs (temporal and spiritual rulers) of Medina. But the foundation of the Umayyad dynasty in 661, governing from its centre of Damascus a vast military empire, produced a legal development of much broader dimensions. With the appointment of judges, or qāḍīs, to the various provinces and districts, an organized judiciary came into being. The qāḍīs were responsible for giving effect to a growing corpus of Umayyad administrative and fiscal law; and since they regarded themselves essentially as the spokesmen of the local law, elements and institutions of Roman-Byzantine and Persian-Sāsānian law were absorbed into Islamic legal practice in the conquered territories. Depending upon the discretion of the individual qāḍī, decisions would be based upon the rules of the Qurʾān where these were relevant; but the sharp focus in which the Qurʾānic laws were held in the Medinian period had become lost with the expanding horizons of activity.

Development of different schools of law

A reaction to this situation arose in the early 8th century when pious scholars, grouped together in loose, studious fraternities, began to debate whether or not Umayyad legal practice was properly implementing the religious ethic of Islam. Actively sponsored by the ʿAbbāsid rulers, who came to power in the mid-8th century pledged to build a truly Islamic state and society, the activities of the jurists (faqīh, plural fuqahāʾ) in these early schools of law marked the real beginning of Islamic jurisprudence. Their aim was to Islamize the law by reviewing the current legal practice in the light of the Qurʾānic principles and then on this basis adopting, modifying, or rejecting the practice as part of their ideal scheme of law.

Of the many early schools of law, the two most important were those of the Mālikīs in Medina and the Ḥanafīs in al-Kūfah, named after two outstanding scholars in the respective localities, Mālik ibn Anas and Abū Ḥanīfah. Inevitably the Mālikī and Ḥanafī doctrines, as they were then being recorded in the first compendiums of law, differed considerably from each other, not only because free juristic speculation was bound to produce varying results but also because the thought of the scholars was conditioned by their different social environments. A deep conflict of juristic principle emerged within the schools between those who maintained that outside the terms of the Qurʾān scholars were free to use their reason (raʾy) to ascertain the law and those who insisted that the only valid source of law outside the Qurʾān lay in the precedents set by the Prophet himself.

The jurist al-Shāfiʿī (died 820) aimed to eliminate these schisms and produce greater uniformity in the law by expounding a firm theory of the sources from which the law must be derived. Al-Shāfiʿī’s fundamental teaching was that knowledge of the Sharīʿah could be attained only through divine revelation found either in the Qurʾān or in the divinely inspired traditions (Sunnah) of the Prophet as ascertained through authentic reports (Hadith). Human reason in law should be strictly confined to the process of analogical deduction, or qiyās—problems not specifically answered by the divine revelation were to be solved by applying the principles upon which closely parallel cases had been regulated by the Qurʾān or Sunnah.

Al-Shāfiʿī’s insistence upon the importance of the Sunnah as a source of law produced a great activity in the collection and classification of Hadiths, particularly among his own supporters, who formed the Shāfiʿī school, and the followers of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855) who formed the Ḥanbalī school. Muslim scholarship maintained that the classical compilations of Hadiths—especially those of Bukhārī (died 870) and Muslim (died 875)—constituted an authentic record of the Prophet’s precedents. The general view of Western orientalists, however, is that a considerable part of the Sunnah represents the views of later jurists fictitiously ascribed to the Prophet to give the doctrine a greater authority.

Later developments

Al-Shāfiʿī’s thesis formed the basis of the classical theory of the roots of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), which crystallized in the early 10th century. Juristic “effort” to comprehend the terms of the Sharīʿah is known as ijtihād, and legal theory first defines the course that ijtihād must follow. In seeking the answer to a legal problem, the jurist must first consult the Qurʾān and the Sunnah. Failing any specific solution in this divine revelation, he must employ analogy (qiyās) or certain subsidiary principles of reasoning—istiḥsān (equitable preference) and istiṣlāḥ (the public interest). The legal theory then evaluates the results of ijtihād on the basis of the criterion of ijmāʿ (consensus). As an attempt to define Allah’s law, the ijtihād of individual scholars could result only in a tentative conclusion termed ẓann (“conjecture”). But where a conclusion became the subject of unanimous agreement by the qualified scholars, it became a certain (yaqīn) and infallible expression of Allah’s law.

Two major effects flowed from this classical doctrine of ijmāʿ. It served first as a permissive principle to admit the validity of variant opinions as equally probable attempts to define the Sharīʿah. Second, it operated as a restrictive principle to ratify the status quo; for once the ijmāʿ had cast an umbrella authority not only over those points that were the subject of a consensus but also over existing variant opinions, to propound any further variant was to contradict the infallible ijmāʿ and therefore tantamount to heresy.

Ijmāʿ set the final seal of rigidity upon the doctrine, and from the 10th century onward independent juristic speculation ceased. In the Arabic expression, “the door of ijtihād was closed.” Henceforth jurists were muqallids, or imitators, bound by the doctrine of taqlīd (“clothing with authority”—i.e., unquestioned acceptance) to follow the doctrine as it was recorded in the authoritative legal manuals.

Sharīʿah law is a candidly pluralistic system, the philosophy of the equal authority of the different schools being expressed in the alleged dictum of the Prophet: “Difference of opinion among my community is a sign of the bounty of Allah.” But outside the four schools of Sunni, or orthodox, Islam stand the minority sects of the Shīʿite and the Ibāḍīs whose own versions of the Sharīʿah differ considerably from those of the Sunnis. Shīʿite law in particular grew out of a fundamentally different politico-religious system in which the rulers, or imams, were held to be divinely inspired and therefore the spokesmen of the Lawgiver himself. Geographically, the division between the various schools and sects became fairly well defined as the qāḍīs’ courts in different areas became wedded to the doctrine of one particular school. Thus Ḥanafī law came to predominate in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent; Mālikī law in North, West, and Central Africa; Shāfiʿī law in East Africa, the southern parts of the Arabian peninsula, Malaysia, and Indonesia; Ḥanbalī law in Saudi Arabia, Shīʿite law in Iran and the Shīʿite communities of India and East Africa; Ibāḍī law in Zanzibar, ʿUman, and parts of Algeria.

Although Sharīʿah doctrine was all-embracing, Islamic legal practice has always recognized jurisdictions other than that of the qāḍīs. Because the qāḍis’ courts were hidebound by a cumbersome system of procedure and evidence, they did not prove a satisfactory organ for the administration of justice in all respects, particularly as regards criminal, land, and commercial law. Hence, under the broad head of the sovereign’s administrative power (siyāsah), competence in these spheres was granted to other courts, known collectively as maẓālim courts, and the jurisdiction of the qāḍīs was generally confined to private family and civil law. As the expression of a religious ideal, Sharīʿah doctrine was always the focal point of legal activity, but it never formed a complete or exclusively authoritative expression of the laws that in practice governed the lives of Muslims.

The substance of traditional Sharīʿah law

Sharīʿah duties are broadly divided into those that an individual owes to Allah (the ritual practices or ʿibādāt) and those that he owes to other human beings (muʿāmalāt). It is the latter category of duties alone, constituting law in the Western sense, that is described here.

Penal law

Offenses against another person, from homicide to assault, are punishable by retaliation (qiṣāṣ), the offender being subject to precisely the same treatment as his victim. But this type of offense is regarded as a civil injury rather than a crime in the technical sense, since it is not the state but only the victim or his family who have the right to prosecute and to opt for compensation or blood money (diyah) in place of retaliation.

For six specific crimes the punishment is fixed (ḥadd): death for apostasy and for highway robbery; amputation of the hand for theft; death by stoning for extramarital sex relations (zinā) where the offender is a married person and 100 lashes for unmarried offenders; 80 lashes for an unproved accusation of unchastity (qadhf) and for the drinking of any intoxicant.

Outside the ḥadd crimes, both the determination of offenses and the punishment therefore lies with the discretion of the executive or the courts.

Law of transactions

A legal capacity to transact belongs to any person “of prudent judgment” (rāshid), a quality that is normally deemed to arrive with physical maturity or puberty. There is an irrebuttable presumption of law (1) that boys below the age of 12 and girls below the age of 9 have not attained puberty, and (2) that puberty has been attained by the age of 15 for both sexes. Persons who are not rāshid, on account of minority, mental deficiency, simplicity, or prodigality, are placed under interdiction: their affairs are managed by a guardian and they cannot transact effectively without the guardian’s consent.

The basic principles of the law are laid down in the four root transactions of (1) sale (bayʿ), transfer of the ownership or corpus of property for a consideration; (2) hire (ijārah), transfer of the usufruct (right to use) of property for a consideration; (3) gift (hibah), gratuitous transfer of the corpus of property, and (4) loan (ʿāriyah), gratuitous transfer of the usufruct of property. These basic principles are then applied to the various specific transactions of, for example, pledge, deposit, guarantee, agency, assignment, land tenancy, partnership, and waqf foundations. Waqf is a peculiarly Islamic institution whereby the founder relinquishes his ownership of real property, which belongs henceforth to Allah, and dedicates the income or usufruct of the property in perpetuity to some pious or charitable purpose, which may include settlements in favour of the founder’s own family.

The Islamic law of transactions as a whole is dominated by the doctrine of ribā. Basically, this is the prohibition of usury, but the notion of ribā was rigorously extended to cover, and therefore preclude, any form of interest on a capital loan or investment. And since this doctrine was coupled with the general prohibition on gambling transactions, Islamic law does not, in general, permit any kind of speculative transaction the results of which, in terms of the material benefits accruing to the parties, cannot be precisely forecast.

Family law

A patriarchal outlook is the basis of the traditional Islamic law of family relationships. Fathers have the right to contract their daughters, whether minor or adult, in compulsory marriage. Only when a woman has been married before is her consent to her marriage necessary; but even then the father, or other marriage guardian, must conclude the contract on her behalf. In Ḥanafī and Shīʿite law, however, only minor girls may be contracted in compulsory marriage, and adult women may conclude their own marriage contracts, except that the guardian may have the marriage annulled if his ward has married beneath her social status.

Husbands have the right of polygamy and may be validly married at the same time to a maximum of four wives. Upon marriage a husband is obliged to pay to his wife her dower, the amount of which may be fixed by agreement or by custom; and during the marriage he is bound to maintain and support her provided she is obedient to him, not only in domestic matters but also in her general social activities and conduct. A wife who rejects her husband’s dominion by leaving the family home without just cause forfeits her right to maintenance.

But it is in the traditional law of divorce that the scales are most heavily weighted against the wife. A divorce may be effected simply by the mutual agreement of the spouses, which is known as khulʿ when the wife pays some financial consideration to the husband for her release; and according to all schools except the Ḥanafīs a wife may obtain a judicial decree of divorce on the ground of some matrimonial offense—e.g., cruelty, desertion, failure to maintain—committed by the husband. But the husband alone has the power unilaterally to terminate the marriage by repudiation (ṭalāq) of his wife. Ṭalāq is an extrajudicial process: a husband may repudiate his wife at will and his motive in doing so is not subject to scrutiny by the court or any other official body. A repudiation repeated three times constitutes a final and irrevocable dissolution of the marriage; but a single pronouncement may be revoked at will by the husband during the period known as the wife’s ʿiddah, which lasts for three months following the repudiation (or any other type of divorce) or, where the wife is pregnant, until the birth of the child.

The legal position of children within the family group, as regards their guardianship, maintenance, and rights of succession, depends upon their legitimacy, and a child is legitimate only if it is conceived during the lawful wedlock of its parents. In Sunni law no legal relationship exists between a father and his illegitimate child; but there is a legal tie, for all purposes, between a mother and her illegitimate child. Guardianship of the person (e.g., control of education and marriage) and of the property of minor children belongs to the father or other close male, agnate relative, but the bare right of custody (ḥaḍānah) of young children, whose parents are divorced or separated, belongs to the mother or the female, maternal relatives.

Succession law

An individual’s power of testamentary disposition is basically limited to one-third of his net estate (i.e., the assets remaining after the payment of funeral expenses and debts) and two-thirds of the estate passes to the legal heirs of the deceased under the compulsory rules of inheritance.

There is a fundamental divergence between the Sunni and the Shīʿite schemes of inheritance. Sunni law is essentially a system of inheritance by male agnate relatives or ʿaṣabah—i.e., relatives who, if they are more than one degree removed from the deceased, trace their connection with him through male links. Among the ʿaṣabah, priority is determined by: (1) class, descendants excluding ascendants, who in turn exclude brothers and their issue, who in turn exclude uncles and their issue; (2) degree, within each class the relative nearer in degree to the deceased excluding the more remote; (3) strength of blood tie, the germane, or full blood, connection excluding the half blood, or consanguine, connection among collateral relatives. This agnatic system is mitigated by allowing the surviving spouse and a limited number of females and nonagnates—the daughter; son’s daughter; mother; grandmother; germane, consanguine, and uterine sisters; and uterine brother—to inherit a fixed fractional portion of the estate in suitable circumstances. But the females among these relatives only take half the share of the male relative of the same class, degree, and blood tie, and none of them excludes from inheritance any male agnate, however remote. No other female or non-agnatic relative has any right of inheritance in the presence of a male agnate. Where, for example, the deceased is survived by his wife, his daughter’s son, and a distant agnatic cousin, the wife will be restricted to one-fourth of the inheritance, the grandson will be excluded altogether, and the cousin will inherit three-fourths of the estate.

Shīʿite law rejects the criterion of the agnatic tie and regards both the maternal and paternal connections as equally strong grounds of inheritance. In the Shīʿite system the surviving spouse always inherits a fixed portion, as in Sunni law, but all other relatives, including females and nonagnates, are divided into three classes: (1) parents and lineal descendants; (2) grandparents, brothers and sisters, and their issue; (3) uncles and aunts and their issue. Any relative of class one excludes any relative of class two, who in turn excludes any relative of class three. Within each class the nearer in degree excludes the more remote, and the full blood excludes the half blood. While, therefore, a male relative normally takes double the share of the corresponding female relative, females and nonagnates are much more favourably treated than they are in Sunni law. In the case mentioned above, for example, the wife would take one-fourth, but the remaining three-fourths would go to the daughter’s son, or indeed to a daughter’s daughter, and not to the agnatic cousin.

Under Shīʿite law the only restriction upon testamentary power is the one-third rule, but Sunni law goes further and does not allow any bequest in favour of a legal heir. Under both systems, however, bequests that infringe these rules are not necessarily void and ineffective; the testator has acted beyond his powers, but the bequest may be ratified by his legal heirs.

Further protection is afforded to the rights of the legal heirs by the doctrine of death sickness. Any gifts made by a dying person in contemplation of his death are subject to precisely the same limitations as bequests, and, if they exceed these limits, will be effective only with the consent of the legal heirs.

Procedure and evidence

Traditionally, Sharīʿah law was administered by the court of a single qāḍī, who was the judge of the facts as well as the law, although on difficult legal issues he might seek the advice of a professional jurist, or muftī. There was no hierarchy of courts and no organized system of appeals. Through his clerk (kātib) the qāḍī controlled his court procedure, which was normally characterized by a lack of ceremony or sophistication. Legal representation was not unknown, but the parties would usually appear in person and address their pleas orally to the qāḍī.

The first task of the qāḍī was to decide which party bore the burden of proof. This was not necessarily the party who brought the suit, but was the party whose contention was contrary to the initial legal presumption attaching to the case. In the case of an alleged criminal offense, for example, the presumption is the innocence of the accused, and in a suit for debt the presumption is that the alleged debtor is free from debt. Hence the burden of proof would rest upon the prosecution in the first case and upon the claiming creditor in the second. This burden of proof might, of course, shift between the parties several times in the course of the same suit, as, for example, where an alleged debtor pleads a counterclaim against the creditor.

The standard of proof required, whether on an initial, intermediate or final issue, was a rigid one and basically the same in both criminal and civil cases. Failing a confession or admission by the defendant, the plaintiff or prosecutor was required to produce two witnesses to testify orally to their direct knowledge of the truth of his contention. Written evidence and circumstantial evidence, even of the most compelling kind, were normally inadmissible. Moreover, the oral testimony (shahādah) had usually to be given by two male, adult Muslims of established integrity or character. In certain cases, however, the testimony of women was acceptable (two women being required in place of one man), and in most claims of property the plaintiff could satisfy the burden of proof by one witness and his own solemn oath as to the truth of his claim.

If the plaintiff or prosecutor produced the required degree of proof, judgment would be given in his favour. If he failed to produce any substantial evidence at all, judgment would be given for the defendant. If he produced some evidence, but the evidence did not fulfill the strict requirements of shahādah, the defendant would be offered the oath of denial. Properly sworn this oath would secure judgment in his favour; but if he refused it, judgment would be given for the plaintiff, provided, in some cases, that the latter himself would swear an oath.

In sum, the traditional system of procedure was largely self-operating. After his initial decision as to the incidence of the burden of proof, the qāḍī merely presided over the predetermined process of the law: witnesses were or were not produced, the oath was or was not administered and sworn, and the verdict followed automatically.

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The Shari’ah (also spelled Sharia) is a system of religious law in Islam. It was developed and written down by Muslim rulers during the AD 700s and 800s. Muslims believe that the Shari’ah expresses Allah’s (God’s) commandments, or rules, for the way a Muslim should live. In Arabic, the word shari’ah means "the path leading to the watering place."

The Shari’ah (also spelled Sharia) is a system of religious law in Islam. It was developed and written down by scholars in the early centuries of the Muslim era (8th-9th centuries). Muslims believe that the Shari’ah expresses Allah’s (God’s) commandments, or rules, for the way a Muslim should live. In Arabic, the word shari’ah literally means "the path leading to the watering place."

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